


Carcinomotus

by HinaBlue



Category: Original Work
Genre: Absent Parents, Abusive Parents, Academy, Biopunk, Bullying, Child Soldiers, Childhood Memories, Crime Scenes, Dark Fantasy, F/F, F/M, M/M, Magic, Male Homosexuality, Multi, Original Character(s), Original Fiction, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Past Child Abuse, Polyamory, Post-Apocalypse, Psychological Trauma, Psychosis, Racism, Serial Killers, Training, War, Xenophobia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:14:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25440724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HinaBlue/pseuds/HinaBlue
Summary: This story has been in my head for nearly 20 years, but it's been prone to dramatic revisions and has lived through at least 30 major rewrites.Now I've reached a point, where I'm satisfied with and proud of the overall outline and structure I've planned out, the only thing left being me doing it justice.The one thing I learned about writing in my life is: If you're good enough, you can make everything work.Here's to me punishing my ass to reach the summit of my abilities and hopefully refining my craft to a point, where I can get away with all the shenanigans in my head.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	1. Interlocked

They shot the woman first.

Then her body was prepared and transformed, taking something beautiful to break and make a tragedy.

Lastly, the thespian displayed her, their work, their gruesome magick, like a painting for the world to see.

The venue they chose, is a park in the center of the metropolis, with the crowns of old, large trees growing wide into a quaint lake at dusk.

The trees are in full bloom, with every other tree holding cherry blossoms. The smallest of them serve as framing for the killer's design.

The torso opened with a single precise cut from sternum to the mons veneris, her organs replaced with flowers, exotic and momentous alike. The body bent and fitted into the hollow tree, wearing the bark like a second skin.

The stark contrast between her skin, fair in life, now bleached lily-white, her blood-red painted lips and the black bark residing on her head where her hair should be, begs the beholder to recognize the essence of the piece is a dyad, a transcendence, and an escalation.

Strong branches hold her arms, sewn in place with intricate stitches, the posture a portrait of elegance and ease worthy of a dancer. The palms are opened up to the sky, a zestful prayer, serving the subject’s magnificence.

Her face greets the gods, but her eyes are no more. The sockets hollowed out in a crude and clumsy manner, a cruel act void of intent.

Black and yellow barrier tapes secure the scene, preserving the murderer’s canvas, while the sirens and flashing lights call, a flirtatious beckoning, pulling in onlookers, curious at heart and bored out of their minds.

A small woman fights her way past the staring mop, followed by a much taller male.

The annoyance and disgust pricks at her stomach, a chilling sensation pushing for her to act on their disrespect.

She opts for her mask of calm indifference, as what’s to gain by the interaction with bored sheep of society is intimate knowledge to her.

With a flash of their badges, they’re granted access to the scene, a detective greeting them absently.

“It’s one of yours. But it’s one of ‘those’ cases, so we had to call you”, he states, a tad too dismissive for the compassionate face he puts on.

The woman ignores him and steps closer to the corpse of her subordinate.

Something cold manifests in her stomach and a heaviness folds around her chest. She filters the obvious clues briefly and understands why the link between this display and the case assigned to her squad is easily established.

Knowing what she knows of the case and the killer's’ modus operandi, she has reservations about this seemingly easy connection.

“Nikita”, she speaks. “Get them out of here.” Her male colleague stares at the victim in a stupor, before his eyes wander over to her, the meaning of her words lost to him for a moment.

“Yes, Captain”, he answers eventually, face stern, and starts to give out orders to the officers on scene.

Most of them retreat behind the barrier, dispelling the cluster of gawkers as they are told.

"How long has she been out here?" she asks.

"We don't know yet. Could have been days already. This part was closed off in preparation for the debate last Thursday. Some drunks trespassing found her.", the detective answers.

"If they hadn’t, the workers decorating would have possibly found her." She takes mental note to contact the office organizing the debate tomorrow.

"Lunar also likes to take his time preparing his drop sites."

The annoyance bubbles up in her again. “You see a corpse decorated with flowers on a full moon night, and you automatically assume it’s Lunar?”, she asks, noticing more things not adding up to the serial killer in question.

“I’ve been on the task force for two years, I know a Lunar victim when I see them. That guy's a lover of field theatrics”, he says, sounding more defensive than his choice of words allows.

She is not impressed. “Do you really believe a serial killer, who targets politicians to display them in ways to disgrace them or their ideology, did this? The discrepancies are everywhere. It’s like a negative of their usual MO, while Lunar is perfectly consistent.”

“Are you proposing there’s a copycat on the loose?”

“I am telling you, this is unusual, and we need to consider every angle. You failed to catch this killer in over two years, pardon if I don’t trust your judgment on this.”

The way his face turns red tells her she has insulted him. “You seem awfully emotional today”, a diversion, and she knows it. “Do you think it wise to be working that case yourself, Girly?”, the detective asks.

“No. But I know you don’t care for our kind.”, she answers coldly, not concerned enough anymore to take her eyes off the corpse while addressing him.

Hiding his embarrassment behind a dismissive gesture, the detective leaves the premises, cursing the Captain under his breath.

She pays him no mind, dons gloves, and begins investigating the body from up close.

“Should I call the others in?”, Nikita returns to her side. His mask of duty discarded in the security of their solitude, the loss tugging on the corners of his mouth and weighing down his eyes.

“No.”

“Don’t they deserve to know? She was our friend”

“They do. But they don’t deserve to see her like that”, she tells him, breaking off a piece of bark with a pair of tweezers and securing it in a tiny tube. “You shouldn’t be here either, I know you and Dhalia were sleeping together.”

His eyes twitch at her mentioning the victim’s name. His eyebrows furrowed, he averts his deep frown of a face from her. “I won’t leave you to bear this alone.”

“You will go back to HQ.”

“No.”

“Nikita-”

“Cryhsalee. Don’t send me away. Not now of all times.”

The captain considers him with a strict but sympathetic gaze. His face is twisted with hurt and loss, and she assumes the helpless rage waits right behind his teeth.

She sighs and focuses back on the body. “Then please, till we can hand her over to pathology, treat her as a Jane Doe. I’m barely keeping it together myself, and seeing your face like that doesn’t help.”

A moment of silence, and then Nikita exhales deeply. “Understood. Thank you, Captain”, he says. He puts on gloves and climbs a ladder left by the investigators. With a small flashlight, he examines the injuries on her eyes.

Cryhsalee catches him swallowing hard at the sight.

In deep thought, she’s still harmonizing the flowers with their meanings and the organs they’re replacing. “Was her brain replaced, too?”

Even though it’s clearly taxing for him, Nikita investigates the hollow of the body’s head through her eyes. “Yes. Purple blossoms with white fingers. It looks like it climbs around something. I don’t know the name, but I’ve seen them before. You have them in your garden.”

“Must be clematis, then”, the captain shakes her head. “Ingenuity, artifice, and mental beauty.”

Nikita secures a blossom with long tweezers for the lab. “I don’t think whoever killed and displayed her did that to her eyes.”

“You’re right. The flowers’ language is as important as it is significant. What the killer left her with is as much praise as it is an apology. It does not match with the impatient treatment of the eyes.”

“She got too close.”

“Probably. The Killer praises her for it, but she’s not the one they apologize to for it.” She rubs her eyes and her temples.

“What do you mean?”

“The flowers are meant to say sorry. But it’s not ‘sorry I killed you’ but ‘sorry for your loss’.

She has pink orchids as her heart. That’s a symbol of sympathy and love for the ones left behind. The killer is apologizing to them.”

For the sake of their work and sanity, Cryhsalee does not clarify on the 'who' any further, but the unpleasant heat emanating from Nikita tells her he already knows.

Meticulously she harvests samples of each flower, of the skin, and the arcane residue around the incision in the torso, though her thoughts are taking her down a road of dark musings.

She startles by the sound of Nikita’s voice.

“There’s something in her throat.”

He fishes it out, his hands steady and careful and Cryhsalee’s eyes grow wide at the sight of a single pink Camellia and a lone Zinnia, with a pupa sewn in to connect them. “What does that mean?”

“Longing for absent friends.” Cryhsalee feels cold in her bones, while Nikita’s shoulders start burning.

The fire is bright and red and erratic, but he keeps focus, so Cryhsalee doesn’t mention it.

A silence falls upon them. They keep on working the corpse, taking pictures, and bag up every sample.

The uncanny feeling clings to her while she makes the call for the crime scene cleaners and transport.

The fires subside, but Nikita hasn’t calmed down in the least.

They wait in silence for their arrival, faces blank, and leave as soon as they've signed off the papers, not allowing the humans to catch a glimpse of weakness.

Past the barrier tape the park cleared out, it's dark now, and chilly, even with Nikita rivaling a walking radiator by now she's freezing.

They walk up to their squad truck and Cryhsalee climbs into the driver’s seat, while Nikita heads into a dark alley.

The sigil on her left hand, the Piscis Eye Trinity Nikita had marked her with when she was barely a teen, throbs, and twitches, as his anguish bleeds into her through their connection, and so the familiar tug of war begins.

He let go of his thin and stretched composure, unleashing an avalanche of sinister and burning emotions with misery right at its core, submitting himself, his self-control, and safety to her, while she has to set aside her own feelings to hyperfocus on keeping him in check and stopping him from transmigrating.

She listens with guilt to the sound of fists and legs connecting violently to metal and heartbreaking bellows, watches the big clusters of light dance with shadows on the wall, knowing Nikita is burning again, bigger and brighter than before, and dials for another subordinate.

The dial tone seems endless, though the recipient picks up on the third ring.

“Captian?”, the youthful voice of their newest member sounds in her earpiece.

“Canice”, she says partly surprised, because she forgot she’d put him on phone duty. How could she forget?

“Yes, I’m here. Is everything alright? You don’t sound so good.”

“Don’t worry about me. Is everyone well?”

“Yes. Well no. Everyone is back from their assignments already, but no word from Dhalia still.”

“I see.” She winces and startles at the sound of massive metal bending. “I have a job for you. We need to know everything Dhalia has been up to for the past two weeks. I want to check it tonight. Get the others to help.”

Her hand starts to tingle and prickle with heat, one of the stronger outbursts. She had to handle him at his worse, so this is not difficult for her to handle, but not less uncomfortable.

With closed eyes and calm and steady breaths, she imagines the sea, the waves of rage crashing violently against her, commanding them to surrender.

“Got it. We also received a request for you to review. Will you be back soon, captain?”

The waves are reluctant, growing more erratic at first, but she stays steady and stubborn, and the waves subside. Violent lashes make way for regretful pushes, growing into desperate clinging, till all that’s left is the sea hugging her lazily.

She opens her eyes and strokes the sigil, calming down the irritated skin, while she becomes more and more irritated by dull pressure in her head.

Nikita returns from the alley, his right leg slightly limping.

“We’re 90 minutes out. What’s the request about?”

He crawls onto the passenger’s seat, looking broken, spent and lonely, and lays his head in Cryhsalee’s lap. He has many small cuts on his hands and they're red and offended by the abuse.

“The new minister of health wants us on his personal detail.”

She caresses his long white hair, then the fresh stubble on his chin. He grabs her hand, clinging to the small gesture of comfort.

“That’s this young guy, right? Has some crazy ideas it seems.”

“Yeah, I’ve been following him for years now. I think you might appreciate what he’s doing.”

“I’ll look into it. Thanks, Canice.”

“Don’t mention it. Later, Captain.”

She disconnects the call and starts the car. “Better?”

Nikita sits up and lazily closes the door of the truck. “No, just too numb to be angry.” He sinks inside himself, grabbing her hand again.

They pull up the highway, and Cryhsalee has trouble keeping her mind off the case, and with it the horrible display of her dead subordinate. Both women never had gotten to a point where they would consider each other friends, but respect was mutual and they accepted each other as part of the weird family that is the Hell Squad.

It’s disheartening for her knowing this family wouldn’t exist, if it wasn’t for the Lunar killer, as the squad was formed exclusively to battle the new threat of a Magus gone rogue to become a serial killer.

She does not question why law enforcement wasn’t able to catch them, and she does not blame them, either. They are in a severe disadvantage against an intelligent psychopath, who lives and breathes defying laws of physics or using them to slow the investigation.

But in fact, she’s just happy the squad members all found a place to be more than social outcasts and found people who’d have their backs.

The headache just thinking about breaking the news to them is already getting worse. She's shifting gears to autonomous and lets herself sink into the pad of the seat. Through the window, she minds her surroundings passing by, in an effort to find something to occupy her mind with.

The air is flooded by the light pollution of larger than life holograms covering the facades of every other tall building.

There are large displays for commercials. The largest by far, and also the most annoying, are the ones promoting the candidates who are running for governor in the current election.

Her being excluded from the voting does not stop her to inform herself about the candidates. She’s part of the law enforcement, after all, so the changes they are making concern her, too.

Them all being idols, even if aged in most cases, has her questioning their fitness for the job. She remembers the young minister is also in the game and she is convinced he’s crazy, or stupid, or both, but which it is, she’ll know soon enough if she’s willing to grant his request.

Another hologram praises the rising star on the sky that is 'Future House': Kitsune. Cryhsalee thinks it ironic, that a genre of music, that was founded centuries in the past and rediscovered around 10 years ago is called ‘Future’, but shrugs it off mentally.

“Let’s talk the case, like any other. The silence is maddening”, Nikita picks up again.

His face is all sinister sadness and his grip on her hand becomes tighter the more time passes.

Even though she'd rather not talk and shove the case away, for the time being, she knows he needs this now.

“I think it’s Lunar. Even though the MO is off. But I’m having a hard time believing, the person who killed someone and shoved a part of his brain into his ass could be so … gentle”, he continues.

She pulls a grimace at the memory of that case. “Yeah, in its own twisted way, that was kind of hilarious. The victim was a senator big on the women’s protection act. After his death, he was exposed to have molested several underage girls.”

Nikita snorts, with his grin vanishing as quickly as it came upon him. “Didn't know that. Lunar does have a sense of humor, I’ll give them that.”

Cryhsalee zones out and reflects on what Nikita said. It is hard to imagine Lunar, who makes a public show of disgracing his human victims, being so soft with a homunculi victim not fitting his profile.

She balances the questions in her mind: Is it race-related, or her occupation? Is it a trap? The profile is so damn clear, it is practically gift-wrapped.

“Maybe that’s the problem”, she muses.

“I guess you don’t mean his humor by that.”

“No, I just thought we’d see things more clearly if we just accept for now, that Lunar is capable of both these types of killings, disregarding their motive.”

He considers her for a little. “Then the MO isn’t so off.”

“It is off, but to a much lesser degree than we thought." She nods. “A public display. It’s a site with political significance, too. The whole scene-setting, with its floral design and theatrics, also fitting. The organs were removed with surgical accuracy and with chi-enhanced methods, judging by the abundance of arcane residue found around the incisions.”

“Yeah.” Nikita dwells on it for a while. “She was also bloodless like the other victims and her skin was hardened.”

“We don’t know yet if she was drugged and paralyzed and if she was alive during the organ removal, but the entry wound on her shoulder is consistent with the MO.” She rubs her temples again. “I hope they showed mercy for once.”

Nikita’s mood darkens again. “At least they did not mock her, as they did with the others.”

She nods in agreement. “The other victims clearly were pigs to them. With Dhalia they displayed a twisted kind of respect.”

“I got that sense, too. She got so close to catching them, that she forced their hand. She’d still be alive if she wasn’t so smart and stubborn.” He squeezes Cryhsalee’s hand absently, his knuckles turn white.

She squeezes back to get his attention. “That won’t bring her back.”

He sighs deeply, loosening the death grip. “I know.”

"Speaking of knowing." She sighs and feels guilty again. "The detective was right."

"By accident, I bet. But yes, you were a frigid bitch, and implied he was a racist and a xenophobe. Maybe he is, I don't really care, most humans are. But you are better than that."

"Today I wasn't, I know." She knows he is right, but feels a little miffed, too.

"You care about her, too", Nikita concedes. "I'm sorry I'm so hard on you. I know you are not the dead-inside robot you pretend to be."

Dismissing the uncomfortable situation, she changes the subject quickly.

"I have goosebumps about the pupa", a quiet confession. "And I still don't know what to make of the eyes."

“The whole narrative gives me the creeps. I mean, the killer apologizing to … essentially, us. Do you think they know who we are? Maybe they forced our information out of her.”

The woman stays quiet. With full-force, the uncanny feeling is back and weighs on her intestines with icy vigor.

“Are you alright? You look pale.” Nikita tries again.

“I don’t think they forced it out of her”, she says eventually. “Don’t think they had to. I have a feeling, they knew about us beforehand, and that’s why they’re dancing around our investigations perfectly.”

Her throat feels dry. “Maybe I’m going crazy. But I think the message was created intentionally for us to find. Not any law enforcement, but you and me. Especially me.”

The male considers her with growing suspicion, till a glint of epiphany strikes his wine-red regret-dulled eyes. “Because the pupa is the symbolic origin of your name.”

"Yes, and there's just a handful of people knowing about this. Essentially, just my parents, my sister, you, and… _her_."

The word was almost stuck in her throat and she feels her insides freezing over with numbness and the tattoo on her left wrist starts tingling.

Concerned she raises her hand to look at the Mind Scale, the intricate mosaic of circles and curves, bleed into her veins again, leaving a painting of black ramifications on the skin around her tattoo.

There goes her sanity.

"She also gifted a bouquet of pink camellias and zinnias, along with a single red rose to me when we were younger", she remembers. The pressure of the uncanny feeling that plagued her finally leaving her body, letting her know she found the source of her unease.

Nikita winces next to her, covering up her mind scale with his hand.

"I don't want that to be real." He says, his voice thick with concern, though Cryhsalee has a feeling there's more than one meaning to his words. "I don't even want to think about how much sense that would make. If she-"

"We don't know anything for sure just yet." She tries reassuring him. "I will skip my medication tonight. Maybe I can do a trace that way, and we'll finally get some answers."

"That's madness." he reprimands. "I won't let you, I'll stay with you the whole night."

"As if I could possibly leave you alone in your state," she states matter-of-factly, planning on sneaking out anyway.

He eyes her with suspicion. "If it's her, killing someone close to you and letting us have the body was the biggest mistake she could have possibly made."

"Or it is a calculated escalation on her part."

He groans in annoyance. "You're right. I forgot she is madly smart. I hope we're wrong. I'm praying! I thought she was dead."

Cryhsalee tugs at his hand. "Calm down. We'll know after the trace." She trails off, looking out of the window again.

"You will not trace until you are better. I will tie you to the bed, no, to myself! You stubborn moose of a woman."

"Stop dirty-talking me."

"I'll do everything I have to. Give up. Now."

"You and your underhanded tactics." She rolls her eyes at him.

"It is your fault for refusing to take better care of yourself."

"Nikita, just shut up now." Tired she lays her head, now throbbing with a full-force migraine, on his shoulder.

She just needs this day to end.

They reach the slums. There are no holograms here, just dirty and broken Billboards, unused for years. Except for the highway running over them, there are no streets in the slums, only narrow pathways separating the cabins from each other, if at all. Some of them have hardly more than blankets for a roof.

The slums remind her of earlier days, the days when she learned how different she was from the planets reigning species, even though she looks a lot like them. Her mother had taught her, humans are inferior to them, but they are fearful and inventive. If threatened, they will be cruel even to their own, so they will do worse to others.

While she always doubted her mother mean words, the slums paint a very similar picture, and they stretch on for a depressing while, growing denser, dirtier, and more ruinous the closer they travel to the big wall separating the metropolis from the homunculi villages.

Quietly she wonders how long it will take before the humans start to build another wall to shut out the slums.

They approach the wall, and the autonomous agent stops the truck in range of the street scanner. The monitor in the middle of the vehicle changes from a map to a display of a hand. Cryhsalee puts her fingertips on the spirals indicating the sensors on the image and looks up to the left, revealing her eyes to the small camera in the left corner of the windshield.

The gate starts brimming and a pillar of infrared light engulfs the car, scanning its contents. Identity confirmed, the digitized voice sounds in each of their earpieces. The gate hums again and opens up before them.

Through the gate, in front of them, the highway continues with another gate one kilometer down the road. The vehicle moves again, taking a sharp right to follow the road down the serpentines instead. These lands, encased by two parallel walls extend for several kilometers.

At the end stands the building of Hell Squad’s Headquarters atop a steep bluff, and though they’re coming home, Cryhsalee dreads facing the rest of them. She holds her aching head, knowing what she has to do.

Leaving the truck in the underground car park, they climb the flight of stairs together in silence. Entering the housing section of the building, a homely warmth hugs her body and the smell of a delicious meal invades her nose.

The usual suspects took up kitchen duty for them again because they were late, she realizes.

“We’re home”, Nikita says into the room, moving into the kitchen to greet the others.

Cryhsalee follows, greeting them briefly and thanking Ryuichi and Iego for cooking and being dependable. She announces a meeting for the following morning, bids good night to them, and leaves for her room with Nikita on her heels.

“I thought you wanted to tell them”, he says, the disappointment weighs on his vocal cords.

“I will. Tomorrow. Now get out, I want to shower and sleep.”

“Told you: I won’t leave you alone tonight.”

“Good luck with that”, she states, as she starts to undress as she enters her bathroom, knowing fully well this won’t stop him.

A loud banging sound startles her awake in the middle of the night. She quickly scans her surroundings, finding nothing off about her room. Except for Nikita in her bed, clinging to her.

Blinking the sleepiness away, she watches him lazily. His breathing is soft and quiet, and it calms her down a little.

She wonders how a person so curious and challenging in nature could look peaceful and guesses everyone is an angel in their sleep.

The messy bun normally fixing his long white hair in place is now moderately askew and some stray strands are sprawled over the mattress. He lies on his side, with half of his smooth rectangular face the color of caramel and cinnamon buried in the pillow, his straight nose with the slightly tilted upward tip hidden away.

She realizes his calm look stems from his closed eyes. The exotic combination of straight white brows, with a vanishing upper lid, long white lashes and wine-red eyes, always lit up with a preying glint must be what makes his appearance so oddly intimidating.

Now he looks almost cute with his puffy lower lids, the protruding but slim cheekbones and the fine lines around his heart-shaped lips. His dimples are hidden away neatly by his trimmed full stubble.

Realizing she never really looks at him anymore, she takes her time comparing the tall, toned and lean man to the scrawny kid he was when they first met.

Another loud noise, something tapping on glass.

She flinches and looks over to the terrarium housing her pet snake Vanetta, again nothing out of the ordinary.

She meanders out of Nikitas grip, hearing a rattling breath at the end of the bed, ignoring it in favor of staggering to the bathroom. Quickly checking that he’s still asleep, she enters the room and locks the door.

_ you scheming liar _

_ he should not trust you _

_ this is what he gets for trusting a liarliarliar _

With a deep sigh, she props herself up on the sink, looking into the mirror, soaking in her image.

Her vision is wildly distorted and the dark companion is already clinging to her neck. Nothing but an amalgamation of blackness, fuzzy and fizzing into soft spirals at the edges, its mass intangible to the touch. It peeks over her shoulder with one of the hollow pits of red symbolizing his eyes, with the same cackling and clicking noise that haunted her childhood.

“Haven’t had the pleasure of you in a while”, she says, each word dripping with sarcasm.

Cryhsalee keeps eyeing herself in the mirror, to ground herself in reality. One could probably hide infants inside the bags under her prominent, curved eyes. Yet her eyes itself are as clear and piercing as always. She blames the matte-golden coloring and the slitted iris for that.

The skin on her heart-shaped skin seems pale and dry despite its chestnut color. She wonders about the dryness because she had just showered before going to bed. Sleeping in a bed with the living furnace Nikita might be the reason.

Her round lips are chapped and the scars running from the corners of her mouth across her cheeks seem bigger and uglier today.

The extensive strands of her straight fern green hair framing her face only partly hide the big ears distinctive of her clan: five long and pointed spines, evenly distributed from the highest point of the helix to the lobe, four of them connected by a thin layer of skin.

The lengthy hair falls over her shoulders, softly hugging and hiding her petite figure. Even the gills on her neck and on her ribs seem dry. The dizziness another indication for dehydration.

With a tap of her hand, the faucet opens and fills the tub with water. She gets rid of the black sports bra and the matching hot pants and ties her hair up, looping it 6 times around her hand and fixes it with an elastic.

She catches another glimpse in the mirror. With her body now completely revealed and the view undisturbed, she realizes she should cut back on her training. She looks sickly thin, her breasts are more resembling of mosquito bites, and her nicely toned abs won’t help with that.

Shutting off the faucet she climbs into the tub, the cold of the water a welcome sensation on her thirsty skin. She should have gotten some ice, too late for that now.

If it weren’t for her ears and eyes she could pass off as a human. A thought crossing her mind sometimes now recurring. If she dyed her eyebrows black like she does with her lashes and hid her gills, the humans would most likely think she was some kind of afro-asian mix.

She submerges herself completely, thinking this is the single upside of being only one and a half meters tall: fitting straight into a tub. Her second set of eyelids close and she listens to the beating of her heart and her gills working.

_ stupid child, envying humans _

The dark companion hovers over her, staring.

‘Shut up and show me what I need to see’, she commands the voice in her head, initiating the trace by returning to the memory of Dhalia’s corpse.

Her vision blurs at the fringes and then distorts and fades to black. White and violet stars appear, sharp at first, bleeding into the void eventually, reminding her of the lazy swirls of pouring milk into black tea.

And then she sees Dhalia in front of her.

The mutilations on her eyes heal, like a stabbing inverted. It looks like birds picking at something with their beaks, Cryhsalee realizes. Her skin pinks up and the blonde hair returns in a rapid spurt of growth. Dhalia was an attractive woman in life, with fine features, a delicate bone structure, and kind and happy hazel eyes.

Cryhsalee never wondered what Nikita saw in her, only what brought her to involve herself with someone so clearly unavailable and obsessed with someone else.

_ it’s your fault _

The world shifts again, leaving her feeling dizzy. Seeing the world through Dhalia’s eyes she runs down an alley, dimly lit, most likely a residential zone judging by the absence of store signs. Taking a sharp left down a flight of stairs, Cryhsalee recognizes the reason for the urgency.

Every hair on her hair body rises in anticipation and a frosty cold washes over her.

The most primal sense of preservation has her running for her life, as fast as Dhalia’s legs will take her, which adds to her panic, with Dhalia being much slower than Cryhsalee is used to.

Adrenalin stings in her stomach and across her hands as she senses the predator’s aura drawing closer as the seconds tick by.

Her left shoulder explodes into pain, as something pierces through it and suspends her above the ground, leaving her hanging akin to hooked livestock pending slaughter.

She grabs for the thing keeping her in the air, cutting her hand on what she realizes are thorns on a forest-green vine. Violet light travels in regular pulses through it, pumping a substance into Dhalia’s body leaving her increasingly numb and her senses sharper than ever before.

Her vision is nothing but a festival of the most vivid colors, bright and brilliant, and the darkness of the valley is lost to her entirely. She still feels the pain, but it is twisted into the pleasurable sensation of a climax approaching and the air is thick with bewitching scents, the most prominent being Magnolia and Sweet Pea, and then the smell of citrus and grass and salty air.

The memory of her first kiss, stolen by her first girlfriend occupies the whole of her mind.

She remembers the softness of the foreign lips, the heat of breath on her face, the pressure of their teeth clumsily clicking together, her heart threatening to jump out of her chest, and her core doing somersaults. The cute blush on the brave girl’s cheeks and them giggling girlishly, the skin tingling wherever their hands are touching.

With time and surroundings lost, and her mind captive in the happiest moment she ever lived, Cryhsalee is locked inside the trace. Desperation is bubbling up and drowned instantly by the infatuating cocktail of drug-induced emotions.

The world shifts again and the hangover hits her like a slap in the face and a fist to tummy. There’s a tube in her throat and she’s resisting it violently.

Something tightens around her neck and the numbing feeling returns, originating from the inner elbow. A light above blinds her till a face appears in front of it.

The heart in her chest pounds and then it skips a beat.

“Sorry baby.” The clear sound of the silvery voice, adenoidal and smoky, but soft-spoken still, rips through her. “I did not want you to suffer.”

Before her a familiar face, shaped like a diamond and aged with grace and elegance, captures everything. Blood-red and white hair, bright lilac eyes in the shape of teardrops angled inwardly, curious and playful, the skin pale and dewy, lips perpetually curved into a smirk.

“You’re a fighter, I should have upped the dose”, she speaks again, flirtatiously combing through Dhalia’s blonde hair using her slender fingers.

Cryhsalee can’t breathe. Every moment spent looking at the woman in front of her feels like a needle piercing her heart and a thread pulling tight.

She was right.

_ you knew all along, liar _

_ it’s your fault _

_ you trusted her _

_ everyone is dead because of you _

A rough grip on her shoulder tears her back to reality. She chokes and a series of coughs is hacking through her. Her dark companion is curling and bending with maniacal laughter.

_ everyone will die _

She clings to the edge of the tub, her eyes blinking rapidly to combat her difficulties adjusting.

There’s red in the water, and she slowly realizes it’s blood. The Mind Scale ist acting up again, twitching and tingling, and the residue has grown to engulf the whole of her left hand up to her elbow.

“You scared the shit out of me”, Nikita yells. His grip on her shoulders is tight and desperate, and the fear in his eyes is overwhelming her. “How will I ever be able to trust you, if you keep doing shit like this?”

The regret is a ball in her throat, tight and immobile.

They keep staring at each other, till Nikita breaks the silence again. “What do I have to do for you to finally start caring about your life.”

“It’s not your responsibility.” The words came out too fast for her brain to register.

_ you’re heartless _

He stares at her open-mouthed. “Yeah, that will help.” He shakes his head. “When I’m burying you, cause you finally managed to kill yourself, yes, at least I won’t have to beat myself up about not preventing it because it was never ‘my fucking responsibility’!”, his grip becomes violent, but then he let’s go, laying his forehead on her shoulder.

“I don’t know what to do with you anymore. You’re deaf to everything I say when it comes to your wellbeing. I can’t do this anymore”, Nikita continues. He cleans off the blood on her face but abandons the task halfway through.

“I’m sorry”, she whispers.

“I know.” he picks her up and carries her to the bed, grabbing a towel on the way and laying her down gently. “Me too.”

She takes the towel, dries herself, and wraps it around her body.

_ watch out _

When she feels Nikita’s hand on her chest, pushing her back into the mattress, she jerks, the pulse of chi invading her body is hot and her skin is twitching in pain. She feels her skin breaking and his chi filling in the cracks.

“What-!”

He grabs her and interrupts her with a tight hug. “A blood seal.”

“I know”, she hisses with great annoyance in her voice, feeling defenseless in his bear hug. “I want to know exactly what it does and why you gave it to me unasked.”

“I should have done that ages ago. It will let me know when you’re in danger, or thinking about doing something that will hurt you.”

She narrows her eyes at him. “I told you when you gave me the seal on my hand, you must not ever do that again.”

“And I respected that for much longer than was good for either one of us”, he reprimands, his face hard. “If talking won’t stop your self-destruction, then I’ll have to take action.”

“Leave.”

_ everyone will leave you _

He caresses the back of her head and presses a kiss on her forehead, then gets up and exits her room, leaving her alone with her thoughts, the pillow aimed at his head missing the mark by millimeters.

The restlessness in her guts is unnerving. She hates fighting Nikita and while she had years to gain a deep understanding of his actions, his behavior still makes her anxious at times.

The worst part is knowing he is right.

_ you don’t deserve him _

She gets up to take a look at the seal and get more towels and just now realizes the broken lock on her bathroom. With a sigh, she examines the seal on her chest, which he had put between her breasts.

The skin is red and oozes blood and plasma, but the seal itself ist delicate and intricate, far more developed and way cleaner than the mark he left on her hand. That’s what twenty-one years of progress look like.

A single circle in the middle, the form grows out with two circles of equal size in six directions. A triangle connects the centers of the outer circles on positions one, three, and five, with another connecting the positions two, four, and six, forming a six-pointed star. The design comes to a finish with a single big circle connecting the pointers of the star.

A Hexagram, she remembers from one of the scrolls on sealing she studied with Nikita. A ward of protection from bad luck and stupidity, not in need of a fixed position on the body. It being in close proximity to the heart is an effort to amplify the transmission of her emotions, she realizes.

Her left hand goes into spasms and both seals begin warping.

The Piscis Eye Trinity on her hand, formerly being three small circles of equal size in a vertical row, encased by two intersecting circles double their size and closed off at the top and the bottom with a half-circle each to form the image of three symbolized eyes, now sports the addition of a big circle bordering the whole form, while a symbolized eye appears in the center most circle of the Hexagram on her chest.

Cryhsalee feels insulted and invaded. She does know simultaneous warping means that the seals are now connected, but she can’t remember the effects of a this particular combination.

With a grudge, she decides she will know soon enough and that Nikita does not want to harm her in any way, so she clears out the water from the tub, and cleans the seals. With care, she applies a self-made wound healing agent from a hand-labeled jar to theml.

_ no one cares _

_ you’re pushing everyone away _

_ you’ll die alone _

Anger and sadness dance back and forth in her core, while she opens the cupboard and fishes out her medication, forcing two pills down her throat with a mouth of tap water.

“I haven’t missed you at all. Now shut up”, she bids the voices farewell for now, even though the pills won’t take effect for another twenty minutes.

She cleans the now dry blood off her face around her eyes and her nose. Opening up her still wet bun, she dries the hair off with a towel, and begins weaving the braid-hawk and cornrows, which allow her to keep the hair that long, while not getting in the way while fighting.

Then she throws on fresh underwear and herself into bed. Pushing the situation away, as she does so well, she focuses on the more pressing matters at hand.

The trace was way clearer than she had imagined, but so are the repercussions. She takes another look at her hand, riddled with ramifications. The thought of calling Maester Izaya to get the Mind Scale checked crosses her mind.

That will have to wait though because they just had a major break-through in the case and a depressing one at that. She can wait a little longer. Spending the rest of the night compiling the new data and searching the database for redheaded metropolitan residents, she does not notice the clock ticking away, until the alarm’s sudden ringing has her almost jumping off the bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story has been in my head for nearly 20 years, but it's been prone to dramatic revisions and has lived through at least 30 major rewrites.  
> Now I've reached a point, where I'm satisfied with and proud of the overall outline and structure I've planned out, the only thing left being me doing it justice.
> 
> The one thing I learned about writing in my life is: If you're good enough, you can make everything work.  
> Here's to me punishing my ass to reach the summit of my abilities and hopefully refining my craft to a point, where I can get away with all the shenanigans in my head.


	2. Flowers

In the village where the homunculi live, there was a selectively mute girl and her twin sister, and they were always together, and always alone. Being raised inside the bounds of the clan’s compound with no other children their age had brought them together, closer than blood, in a way only necessity can.

They experienced security far above the standards of their times, with warring factions all around them on either side of the walls. The humans in the east, the wildlings to the west, and inside the walls the other homunculi clans, only masking their hostility to stay in the good graces of the Kaiyō Clan.

The girls were aware of their luck as their mother made sure of it to a fault.

Yet this safety never felt genuine to them. It was something volatile, threatening to vanish if they dared to hold onto it too tightly or look at it too long; something they borrowed in the scarce time they had with their father.

In the past, he’d come and wake them every day before dawn and take them on the short walk to the beach. He would paint pictures in their minds with his tales, vivid colors of marine blue and purple, pink and orange hugging the ocean, whenever the sun rose. Even if they couldn’t see it with their view being blocked by the dirty, moldy grey of the big wall, they saw it in their little hearts.

He taught them a lot, and the girls listened attentively, hanging on each of his words with wonder and curiosity. He was their hero, strong and tall, the tallest of all the Kaiyōni in the clan’s main family and much taller than any Kaiyōni they knew of the branch family, and they worshipped his knowledge and wisdom and the colorful and gentle way he viewed the world.

On their daily adventures, he taught them to swim and dive, to stealth and hunt for little things, in the water and on the land, taught them about plants, flowers and berries, fish and animals, to prepare little meals and to only take what their bodies need, to preserve the balance.

Cryhsalee couldn’t quite understand what this balance was, but she knew it was important to her father, as it was at the core of all of his teachings.

A twinge of sadness hit her on the first day their father broke the habit. He didn’t come to wake the twins and Cryhsalee wondered what she had done wrong. 

In the evening he came and took them to the ocean. He had cuts on his face and dirt in his hair and his blue and green robes were torn and dirty, smelling of fire and smoke, and iron and copper, strong and sharp, and almost painful.

He apologized with words and hugs and kisses, with new stories and new teachings, but Cryhsalee noticed the absence of the playful glint in his eyes, even though he joked around like always. The whole day had felt off-center to her.

This was the day he started to pass down the old kaiyōni dances to them and taught them about chi. Dances to protect oneself, dances to hurt another, and dances to lull the liquid of the ocean into kinship with the dancer. They learned about cycles of energy, like the tides and the currents, or the flow of blood in their bodies and how everything is connected to everything through chi.

As descendants of  _ Yue _ they were able to not only feel the flow of chi around them, but also bend it to their will if they put in the work first, their father told them. 

“Be respectful of the chi’s might, and it will respect you as its own. It will give you power if you need it and it will forsake you if you become drunk on it. This power is not yours, it is borrowed, forget that and it will bite you.”

What followed were months of training, intercepted on a weekly basis by one or two days of their father’s absence. Months of tasks to fulfill, techniques and concepts to learn, dances to master, and a force of life itself to seduce.

Cryhsalee was always lagging behind Mariposa by at least a week, and her progress stagnated to a stop, when she witnessed Mariposa’s brilliance, as she danced with bare feet on nothing more but the surface tension of the seawater only hours after being introduced to the teachings of water walking.

She on the other hand didn’t know where to begin anymore. Nothing worked and everything was hard and Mariposa had made it look so easy. She missed the days where the walks were fun and they were out appreciating the smell of citrus and salt in the air instead. The frustration was a ball in her stomach, it fed on her insides and pent up till she threw her little fists through the surface and let herself fall into the water face first, floating like a corpse.

Her father came to sweep her out of the water and placed her little body on his shoulders. “Hey there, what’s the matter, my little moon princess?” he said.

Hiding her face in his hair in shame was the only answer she gave.

“You know, maybe I should have named you Shisui, would be more fitting with you playing dead fish in the water when something bothers you.”

“Is not bothering,” she said.

“Will you tell me what it is, my love?”

“I too stupid.”

She heard her father sigh. “That sounds like something your mother would say.”

He raised her off his shoulders and held her in a soft but strong embrace. “Do you feel that, little one? Do you feel the pressure?”

“Yes”, she said, pressing herself against his body.

“Does it feel good?”

“Yes”

“Do you know why that is?”

“I love you.” She hid her face in his shoulder and cursed her almost breaking voice. 

He chuckled gently. “I love you, too, moon princess. But there’s more. You see, I love you so much, that I want to hug you as hard as I can. Do you know that feeling?”

“Yes.” She peeked at him.

“But if I were to do that, I would hurt you, because I’m too strong, and you’re just a little blossom yet. Do you remember what happened to the poppy i tried to pick up the other week?”

“Broke.”

“Yes. The same thing would happen to you if I were to hold you as strong as I could. And I don’t want that. You shouldn’t want that either. Because you’re strong.”

“Strong? But why break?”

“Strength does not make you unbreakable. Just like the poppy decided to reject my touch, the chi rejects you for applying too much pressure with your strength.”

Cryhsalee looked at him, brows furrowed and her lips twisted into a frown, chewing on his unbelievable words, till a new understanding left her wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

She wiggled out of his embrace, almost not hearing him whisper “You funny child of mine” under his laughter, while she took a tumbling first chi-enhanced step on the water’s surface. She fell in the water immediately after, but emerged instantly and tried it again with Mariposa extending a hand to her to help her keep the balance.

The days went by, and they learned a lot but were more and more left to study alone.

Their father had always been a busy man for as long as they remember, but in the past months his absences had become more frequent and when he finally came home he was bruised and battered, dirty and tired. The days seemed longer, and the nights darker, and their life was suddenly missing their most vibrant color.

They knew he was an important man, and he needed to be there for everyone in the village. They knew he was fighting someone, and if they were able to hurt their father, they must be strong and dangerous. 

Their mother’s disappointment when they came to her with their concerns about their father’s safety was a well-known risk.

“This is our life. When the gods rolled the dice on your soul, you were born as homunculi. You are a living shield. This is our way and it always was and your concerns won’t change that. Soon you’ll learn how to fight and how to kill and join your father in his battles.” 

The girls knew better than to question her and they knew she would stop loving them if they were to make a fuss.

They mustn’t behave like idiots.

She was a formidable presence, strict, and always followed by an air of expectancy, colder than the ocean on the first snow. She was the perfect portrait of a lady, elegant and gorgeous, and almost a perfect Kaiyōni. Between her emerald green hair and her eyes the color of honey, she’d easily be mistaken for a pureblood, if it wasn’t for her hazel skin, or so she told them.

Yet, when it came to their skin color, which was darker due to their father’s contribution, their mother’s opinion was very different on any given day. She would never comment on Mariposa’s skin, though. Only Cryhsalee’s was either too dark because it was darker than hers, or too light because it was lighter than their father’s. 

When they tried to find the differences between their skin, standing in front of the mirror for minutes at the time, just staring, they couldn’t find it.

The confusion left them afraid, that something was very wrong with them. 

Mariposa, always brave and curious, and Cryhsalee envied her so much for it because their mother favored those qualities, was the first and last to ask.

“She’s a demon”, she had answered, staring daggers of frozen hatred at the little girl she accused. “A vile creature from the Otherworld, that fed on your sister’s soul until it was gone and now occupies what’s left of her.”

There’s a first time for everything, and this day was a first time for many things.

The new knowledge weighed down on their little shoulders, and a new emotion tore into Cryhsalee. A clam and numb sensation pulled at her core.

There was clarity in this moment. She didn’t need to wonder anymore, why her mother did not love her. It was only natural. Yet the clarity beckoned certainty, and a resolve previously unknown. She would prove herself to her mother, prove that she’s not a monster, and prove that she is worth loving.

Then clarity grew into insecurity when she realized the distance in Mariposa’s eyes. She didn’t say anything, didn’t need to for Cryhsalee to understand that even the trust and love of her sister, which she never doubted was endless, was in fact finite and conditional.

Her sister had grown afraid of her.

What she did not understand was the wetness she felt on her cheeks, the tears running down on her numb face and why she would soundlessly cry about learning, that life is exactly what she thought it to be.

On this day, when the girls were barely four, Cryhsalee lost her voice for several months to come and learned what loneliness is. This night she first noticed the clicking noises behind her left ear, growing louder and more rapid with the quickening of her heartbeat.

A whisper rang in her ear. She barely took note of the low and soft sound at first, but with time it became progressively louder and more audible. A phrase looping endlessly, she realized, and then it was comprehensible.

_ they don’t deserve you _

A mass of black smoke swirls into existence right in front of her face. 

_ they you don’t they deserve you don’t deserve don’t you deserve they _

The voices mix, sounding muffled, like they’re right in the middle of her brain and her skull trembles with every word. 

_ THEYDON’TDESERVEYOU _

The mass grabs at her and Cryhsalee screams at the top of her lunges, a voiceless, hopeless cry and the world fades to black.

She was yanked back to reality by Mariposa’s small hands on her shoulders, shaking her desperately.

Mariposa pressed herself against her twin, sobbing uncontrollably and clinging onto her, mumbling “sorry, sorry, sorry” all over again.

Her grasp was uncomfortable and strong, but Cryhsalee knew she had to endure it for her sister, who came to her in spite of being afraid. She embraced her, comforting her, and finding comfort for herself.

  
  
  
  
  


Their days at the academy, which they started at the age of six, were dreadful, but not as much as the whispers following Cryhsalee or the nightly visits of the monster. They were not used to other children, and the teachers and their teachings were boring and wrong. 

They kept challenging their father’s teachings and failed them, when the girls were solving their assignments their own way, the way their father taught them, instead of the way they were told to.

  
  
  


The other children were mean about it, too. Not a week went by, where they weren’t picking on them for being stupid, or them being twins, or on Mariposa for being loud and stubborn, or on Cryhsalee for being mute and passive. Taunting them, they would be the first to die on the battlefield.

It all changed when one day a teacher decided to group the girls with different partners for the assignment. Cryhsalee went along with her partner’s lead, a boy from the Žemė clan, who never partook in the teasing, named Kian. 

But Mariposa’s partner kept disturbing her and destroyed any work she had made.

Mariposa kicked the girl’s chair, so she would fall flat on her side, and the classroom lit up with childish laughter. The girl, one of the bigger kids in their class, jumped to her feet and grabbed Mariposa by her fern green braided ponytail and smashed her face against the table.

She never saw Cryhsalee’s chi-enhanced punch to her face coming, and didn’t see much afterward, as she went out cold on impact with the wall behind her.

Cryhsalee faced the room, her small hands trembling, but her face steady and unmoving like a lake frozen over. What followed were the first words she ever spoke to her peers and a venom in her voice, that made their teacher pale.

“If any of you ever touch my sister again, I won’t be nice anymore.”

Servants were sent to pick them up and their mother was furious and kept yelling at Cryhsalee for hours straight. Mariposa tried to convince her mother, that Cryhsalee did nothing wrong, that she had saved her, but their mother wouldn’t even acknowledge her at this point.

Mariposa wound up crying and Cryhsalee became deaf to her mother’s words, focused only on comforting her hurting sister. The yells became nothing more but incomprehensible din and the voices returned with their song, looping over and over again in her head, audible for no one else but her.

_ they don’t deserve you _

The twins only got a break, when their father returned home, with a large black and red scar all across his left arm and stinking of burnt meat, and sent them to their room, after two failed attempts to get their mother to stop yelling at them.

Without any hesitation Cryhsalee took her sister to their room, noticing that their father hindered their mother at following them, and together they climbed into the closet and hid under a blanket.

“Mommy is a liar”, Mariposa said while clinging onto her sister with white knuckles, her voice hoarse from crying.

“Mother is upset with me”, Cryhsalee answers.

“Mommy is always upset with you. Even when it’s my fault.”

“It’s not your fault. The girl hurt you, and I got angry.”

“Of course you got angry. You love me, stupid. You have a very soft heart, so of course you got angry!” Mariposa said, scolding her sister with a prize-worthy pout.

Dumbfounded Cryhsalee blinked at her, searching for something to say, but her sister’s words, with their meaning so outrageous to her, left everything her mind produced on the matter empty.

“Mommy is a liar. She said you’re evil, but you’re not. Everyone is evil, but not you. She lied”, Mariposa continued, her eyes red and puffy and tired, and the tears kept falling. “She said we would need to learn to fight and then you fight and she yells at you.”

“I think father got hurt really bad this time.”

“I think mommy is evil.” She said, ignoring Cryhsalee’s attempt to change the subject and then the exhaustion put her lights out, leaving Cryhsalee alone with the frenzy her twin’s words had incited in her head.

_ they don’t deserve you _

Cryhsalee held her sleeping sister, staring threats of violence at the black smoke visiting her again while listening to her parents now yelling at each other.

“She does”, she says, overhearing her father arguing in Cryhsalee’s defense, “and father does.”

  
  
  
  
  


The girls didn’t return to the academy for another week. Their father had talked to them about the incident, wanting to hear their side of things.

It ended with a firm but gentle lecture about them being stronger than the other kids, and that he needed them to understand, they can’t use this weakness without being meanies. He also told them, that he was proud of them for sticking together and of Cryhsalee for protecting her sister and apologized for not being there for them when they needed him.

When Mariposa started confiding in him about how much they hated the academy, and that the teachings were all wrong, something hard and sinister showed on his face. Cryhsalee had never seen her father like this.

“This was a mistake”, he said, with the finality of a dropped teacup shattering on a hard surface. “I’m sorry, girls. I didn’t realize how they treated you there. I’ll find a better teacher for you.”

Not another word was lost on the incident at the Shiono household.

A week later their father took them to the academy. Two young men and their teacher waited to greet them there.

The men were a lot younger than their father, but one of them was almost as tall. He had platinum hair and lily-white skin and eyes as purple as the clematis that grew in their father’s garden, with three long scars running intersecting the left side of his face. He was tall and thin and his arms and legs seemed long, and his face was mean. Cryhsalee couldn’t remember any clan with those colorings, no matter how hard she thought about it.

The other man was a whole head shorter, with pale blonde hair and eyes as bright and blue as the sky. His honey-colored face held the most curious and friendly smile and there were nasty burn marks on his neck. He could be someone from the Foraoise clan regarding the colorings, Cryhsalee imagined, but his hair was a little to light for that, and his body looked a little womanly to her.

Cryhsalee remembered seeing these men before. They had brought a missive to her father a long time ago.

She bared just a short gaze for her teacher, the middle-aged woman named Misa, with her colorings typical of the Žemė clan, with auburn hair, blue eyes, and beige skin. She seemed nervous and kept watching their father closely.

“Mariposa, Cryhsalee, meet Izaya and Sandor. They will be taking over your tutelage. Please get to know each other, while I'll talk things through with your teacher.”

The Kaiyōni twins bowed in greeting to pay their respect to their new teachers and Cryhsalee didn’t miss the dangerous glint in her father’s eyes, while observing his face being a mask of calm and friendliness.

“Nice to meet you”, the blond spoke, “I’m Sandor. Follow me, we want to introduce you to everyone.”

Mariposa hugged her father’s legs and followed the men, while Cryhsalee stayed back for a moment, looking at her father. When he nodded, she turned on her heels catching up to her sister.

They walked over to the training grounds behind the academy, reserved for the older kids starting from class three, while Izaya kept observing Cryhsalee.

“You’re the one that teleported five meters to punch a girl into a wall, aren’t you?”

Cryhsalee lowered her head but gave a small nod anyway.

“Impressive.”

The girl looked up to him in disbelief. “No. Mariposa is better at everything.”

Izaya crooked his head at her and raised an eyebrow and shook his head eventually.

“I knew having the shaman's kids on the team will be interesting.” Sandor chimed in with a happy chuckle.

When they arrived on training ground seven, a boy and a girl waited for them. The boy was taller, which was nothing new, but he was even taller than they were used to for kids their age and the girl being smaller than them was definitely a first.

“Okay brats, get to know each other. This will be your team from here on out. Sandor and I will be your Maesters, not your teachers, and all of us will form a squad. Together we will train and learn and take on missions from the villagers. Don’t get me wrong, this is as much a business arrangement, as it is a social one. We will be each other’s family for all intents and purposes, and always have each other’s backs.” Izaya said.

“And if you’re not fast enough Izaya will adopt you as he did with the rest of the team”, Sandor added happily, much to Izaya’s dismay.

“Shut up.”

Meanwhile, the boy came up to them, ignoring their maester’s antics, and Cryhsalee was wary, as the only other time they met kids was a painful disaster. He had wild, shoulder-length hair the color of copper, and sienna skin, with a series of tiny round scars on his arms, and purple eyes. Was that someone of the Akatsuki clan? 

She wouldn’t know, as she only ever had read about them, but the Akatsuki were the only people with red hair and purple eyes to Cryhsalee’s knowledge, they were said to be pale, though. That boy being an Akatsuki wouldn’t make sense, she mused. They fenced themselves in on their compound in the middle of the village a long time ago, or so their father had told them.

Mariposa surprised Cryhsalee by greeting the boy in the most improper way. “Your hair looks amazing.”

Seemingly caught off guard, the boy snickered quietly and seemed a little embarrassed. “Your hair looks amazing, too. I’m Meiko by the way. Nice to meet you.”

  
“Nice to meet you, too!”, Mariposa suddenly giggled and was visibly excited.

Cryhsalee wondered what had gotten into her and almost startled by a girly voice saying: “I’m Zelijko”

She hadn’t noticed the girl from before closed the distance to them, too. Zelijko kept herself halfway hidden behind Meiko.

“I’m Mariposa! Your eyes are so beautiful! Why do you have different eye colors? I didn’t know that’s possible.”

The girl seemed a bit shy about it, hiding one half of her lily-white face in her long, pale blonde hair. Cryhsalee could still catch a glimpse at the hidden bright blue eye through the strands, opposing an eye the dark color of earth soaked in water.

“It was an accident. Meiko’s eyes are way more interesting anyway.”

At the mentioning of, Cryhsalee took a deeper look at the boy’s eyes, which revealed they were not purple as she had initially thought. Only the outer part of his irises was. The inner circle was blood red.

“This is awesome,” Mariposa said in awe, and Cryhsalee still wondered about her sister’s openness towards those strangers. Something dry stuck in her throat and she stayed some steps away from them and refrained from giving them her name, and observed Mariposa chattering away with an unknown excitement.

“And this is my sister, Cryhsalee”, Mariposa took over the introduction and grabbed for Cryhsalee’s shoulder, only to grab into nothingness as Cryhsalee side-stepped her hand.

She was not comfortable with the strangers yet, and Mariposa’s behavior left her annoyed. Mariposa pouted at her sister’s rejection, but Izaya stepped in, pulling her attention.

“You’re new so you won’t know this, but there’s a rule in this family to not push anyone to do anything. You’ll have to learn to respect that everyone has their own limits and their own timing. This is important.”

“Sorry, Sensei”, Mariposa said and looked away with her lips caught in a frown.

“It’s maester, not sensei. This is not the Kaiyō compound”, he said, watching the frowning girl intently. “Furthermore, I’ll keep you off of missions going beyond the wall for as long as I can. Unlike everyone else in this shithole, I won’t stand for sending children out into the wilds to die. But I can’t keep you safe forever, so Sandor and I will teach you. You will learn how to survive, and what to do with the life you're clinging to so it will have meaning.”

“Spoken like a true revolutionary”, Sandor teased Izaya, gaining a dead-pan in return. “We’ll start with building up your stamina first. So up, twenty laps around the training grounds, no breaks, no kinesis. If I catch you cheating, you’ll be on dish cleaning the whole week.”

Cryhsalee bit her lip and picked nervously on her hair because she knew her father taught her about the magick school of kinesis, but she couldn’t remember what it was.

“Do you have a question, Cryhsalee?”, Izaya asks, and the girl falls a step back, feeling exposed. She quickly shakes her head and follows the other child, deciding it’s better to use no chi at all.

In the following weeks the lessons started at dawn lasting till dusk, taking away the last chance for the adventures with their father, while also tiring them out so much, Mariposa would sometimes fall asleep mid training.

Each day would be a mix of physical training, lessons in combat tactics and strategy, magick and chi control with a test of their abilities on Sunday. In between they would prepare their own meals, rotating which chore they would need to fill in on a weekly basis.

Reluctantly Cryhsalee learned to appreciate, that Meiko was a great cook, and she looked forward to the weeks he was the chef on duty. He was also the only true defender on the team and he knew a little healing magic, too, which he learned from Sandor, who’d told them he picked up some skills after most of his and Izaya’s friends had died.

Everyone else on the team was dubbed “attacker”, but as soon as she saw Izaya spewing a fireball the size of her body, she doubted she would ever have what it takes to do her role justice when the only thing she could produce through transmutation was clouds and warm rain.

She kept her distance to her teammates in and out of training, only tagging along with Mariposa to meetups with Meiko and Zelijko.

Mariposa had a lot of fun and she forged a connection with them quickly, making Cryhsalee sad and insecure. She felt left out, but somehow she felt it was her own fault. Her sister even told her, the only reason for her openness towards Meiko and Zelijko was, that they reminded her of Cryhsalee.

“They seem distant and they are so different from the other kids. But they are really nice and their hearts are just as soft as yours.”

While she could not trust these words, Cryhsalee still accompanied her sister to the meetups and more often than not got pulled in on the fun involuntarily. Like the one time the kids came home early to chat about a rumor they had heard on the streets, about an Akatsukian mother leaving their compound with her child. 

They found Sandor kissing Izaya on the couch, inciting the latter to throw pillows and snarky comments at the kids, which quickly devolved into a pillow fight and ended in the first sleepover of the twin’s lives because Mariposa didn’t want to leave.

The days went by with them training together, learning together and carrying out missions, boring little tasks the villagers paid them for, and she forgot the cause for keeping her distance, but also didn’t know how to change their relationship, and then changing anything seemed more impossible with each day passing.

The team had accepted her as being distant, but Cryhsalee didn’t want to be that way. She didn’t know how to change her ways or how to ask for help with it either.

She took to isolating herself more often than not, leaving her team to be happy without her, unburdened by her.

Until the day a new student was accepted on the team.

For reasons Cryhsalee couldn’t quite grasp at the time, this new teammate of theirs received a lot of attention. 

On this day not only the team was present but also the heads of each of the major clans. Which included the twin’s father, accompanied by their mother, the head of the Žemė, and the head of the Akatsuki, which turned out to be the mother that left the compound with her child, after her husband had been murdered.

The rumors weren’t clear on who murdered the former Akatsuki clan head, but in most stories, it was either the mother or her daughter.

They had the same colorings. Blood red hair intersected by snow-white strands, vibrant purple eyes, and porcelain skin with only a tint of pink. The girl was as tall as the Kaiyōni twins, but Sandor had told them she was about three years younger, almost 5 years old. She had chin-long hair framing her round face and a single black vine growing from the back of her head, and she kept staring at Cryhsalee as if the other people there were beneath her attention.

Cryhsalee returned the intense gaze with one of hers, the one that Maester Izaya dubbed ‘too sinister for a being with a soul’ which she was sure she inherited from her father. This stare in turn made the foreign girl smile. What a strange kid.

Without a care in the world, the girl walked over to Cryhsalee, bowed in a playful but polite fashion and gifted her with a beaming smile. “Hello.”

The scent of Sweet Pea and Magnolia invaded her nose, and just a whiff of Citrus followed. After a short pause, Cryhsalee answered, less joyful and warier than the strange girl. “Hello.”

The girl giggled, and Cryhsalee wondered if she had somehow missed a joke.

“Have you noticed? Your mother tries to have a staring contest with mine, but mommy ignores her.”

With a raised brow Cryhsalee quickly checked out both women and found her mother indeed staring darkly at the Akatsuki clan head talking with her father but also noticed Mariposa silently urging her to talk to the new girl by waving.

“You’re right”, Cryhsalee said and turned to face the girl. “I think she does not like your mother talking to my father.”

“Yes. Isn’t it funny? Like merely talking to someone could be seen as something evil.”

Wondering why a kid younger than her sounded so much like an adult talking, Cryhsalee mulled on the question. “It is a little funny, yes.”

“I bet your mother sees evil in many things.”

“She does.” The truthful answer left her exposed.

“Mommy is not like that. Mommy always says everyone is a little good and a little evil and in the right light everything can seem pitch black.”

“I don’t know what that means”, Cryhsalee felt stupid in this five-year-olds presence, and it did not sit well with her.

The girl visibly thought about her words and smiled again as Cryhsalee calmly waited for her reply.

“When someone wants to see evil, they will find evil, even if what they see is not evil, they will think it’s evil because they need it to be evil.”

“But that would be a lie. They would be lying to themselves.”

“Yes, they would”, the girl smiled again.

“Are you making fun of me?”

“No. I just think you’re pure.”

“You’re hard to understand.”

The smile on her face vanished. “I know”, she said wistfully. “Anyway, what’s your name?”

“Shiono Cryhsalee.”

“So, Cryhsalee must be your given name then by Kaiyōni customs.”

“Why would you know about our customs?”

“Mommy likes your culture. We read a lot about your ways in old books. Mommy even gave me a Kaiyōni name.”

“Really? What is it?”

“Ariasha Senlin. If I were a boy my name would be Arashi.”

“Summer Rain and Thunderstorm.”

“Yes.” Ariasha’s eyes lit up again. “It is a good name. I love the smell of rain on heated earth and the taste of the air right before lightning strikes.”

Cryhsalee considered her for a while, feeling a kinship with this strange girl appreciating little things nature gifted to them, things unnoticed by others. “You’re so different.”

“Is that bad?”

“No.”

Ariasha beamed again. “Cryhsalee, can you tell me why everyone is just staring at us?”

A little startled Cryhsalee checked her surroundings, only then realizing how immersed she had been in her conversation with Ariasha. She had forgotten about the people around her entirely. Her father was watching her, holding his left hand up leisurely, signaling the others to keep quiet.

“Making Friends, Cryhsalee?”, he said, with a laid-back smile on his lips, one she hadn’t witnessed on him for years.

She opened her mouth to reply, but her mother’s words cut her off.

“I’m certain the clan heads have better things to do than watching child’s play. Everyone is here to observe the host’s abilities, so maesters, will you do your job?”

“My name is Ariasha.”

The girl was almost brimming with a confidence that made Cryhsalee shudder. 

“My mother taught me in the arts of our clan, and mastery of the transmigration. Would you allow me to demonstrate my abilities on you, Lady Shiono?”

Lady Shiono narrowed her eyes at the girl, then leveled her mother with a gaze of disgust.

“My child will fear no one, as fear is inviting death into our homes, Lady Shiono.”

“Fear is what keeps one alive, Akatsuki-san. Child, play with someone of your size.” The dismissive tone brought back memories of rejected gifts to Cryhsalee’s mind. “Why don’t you show off a little with this child of mine. She needs practice.”

Cryhsalee wanted to ignore the jab aimed at her, but her body going stiff on its own betrays her. The effect wore off shortly after, as she noticed, that all eyes are pinned on her mother instead of her.

“You must be furious at your mother”, Ariasha says, with a volume just a kiss away from a whisper.

“She has her reasons.”

The air around them shifts and the look of disappointment on Ariasha’s face leaves Cryhsalee speechless.

“Oh, does she now. Are you always like this? An absolute push over, letting everyone and their grandma walk over you? I thought you were fun.”

A taunt and it stings. Why does it sting? She’s so used to being taunted. But now the adrenalin bubbles up in her stomach, bidding her to act.

Ariasha smirks and eases into a combat stance foreign to Cryhsalee. “What’s this? Could it be there’s some actual fight in you?”

“Stop talking. Show me you can back up that big mouth of yours.” 

“Stop it, both of you.” Izaya steps between them. “Not like this.”

“Maester, this is what we’re all here for”, Cryhsalee’s mother speaks again.

“Mausami. Enough.” Her father is not pleased with her mother. “Izaya. Let them have a little friendly competition.”

“With all due respect, Shaman, this is one of your shitiest ideas”, Izaya says unwilling to mask his annoyance with the adults. “Listen brats. If you want to do this, you’ll need to follow the rules. This is a play match, not a real fight. Understood?”

“Yes, sensei”, Cryhsalee says, fixating only on her akatsukian opponent.

“Don’t sensei me, brat.”

“Yes, sensei”, Ariasha parrots, playful and obviously mocking.

Izaya sizes her up over his shoulder, with a dead-pan.

“Maester, don’t interfere with our ways. They will be fighting beyond the wall in months time, keep sheltering them and they’ll die on their first day. Let them prove their mettle, now”, Mausami urges.

His face becomes hard, but he steps off the grounds, joining Sandor on the sidelines, who’s traded in his friendly smiles for a grimace of disdain aimed at the twin’s mother.

“Don’t kill each other”, Izaya orders, raising his hand to signal the start of the match. 

Cryhsalee dashes forward.

She disappears, re-emerging behind Ariasha, securing the girl in a tight headlock. She feels the girl jerking in her grip. Got her.

“Got ya”, Ariasha says, stomps, and thrusts a pulse of chi into the ground. The earth answers her call with roots shooting up, encapsulating Cryhsalee’s wrists and breaking up her grip.

She breaks away with another teleport, noticing Ariasha’s hands on her wrist a second too late. Instead of a safe distance of five meters, the added weight holds her back, and the girls reappear in a knot of arms and legs, tumbling around each other only half a meter away from where they disappeared.

With the full weight of her small body, Cryhsalee forces their motion to a halt, pinning Ariasha to the ground.

Ariasha smiles beneath her. “You’re strong.” She snaps up her knee, landing a direct hit at Cryhsalee’s core, which made her almost throw up her breakfast, but she won’t budge. With a glint of excitement in her eyes, Ariasha slams her head forward, disorienting the kaiyōni, pushing her off and dashing away.

Cryhsalee jumps to her feet wiping the blood off her nose with the back of her hand, feeling a twinge of satisfaction as she notices the bleeding scar on Ariasha’s forehead, crouching on all fours and watching Cryhsalee like a hawk.

“I misjudged you earlier. You are tons of fun.”

“You aren’t.”

“You haven’t seen anything, yet.” A dangerous smile showing too much teeth later, she jumps Cryhsalee.

The green-haired girl side-steps Ariasha, grabbing her right arm, and pinning it on her back, forcing the girl to her knees. Her shoulder explodes into pain, as the vine growing from Ariasha’s head bores into her. She screams into her closed mouth, clenching her teeth to muzzle the sound and grabs the vine, pulling it out.

Izaya jerks on the side, but is held back by Sandor’s hand on his wrist.

Applying pressure to her throbbing shoulder with her right hand, Cryhsalee uses the more nimble fingers on her left to fish for a senbon in the pouch at the back of her belt and ramming it into Ariasha’s neck.

Counting on the paralytic poison she laced the needle with, she’s caught off guard by the hands grabbing her ankles and pulling her feet from under her. She hits her head on the ground and her vision blurs, tiny stars spark in front of her eyes.

“Sorry baby, poisons don’t work on me”, Ariasha says, seconds before Cryhsalee’s fist connects to her face, sending her head-first into the dirt. She rolls away, pushing herself up and sending chi into the ground. Vine’s shoot up, hunting for the kaiyōni.

With two chi-enhanced jumps, Cryhsalee flees, ducking under the entanglement threatening to impale her through her back, searching frantically for a way out. Desperate she grabs for the vines, cutting herself on the thorns and uses her chi to suck the liquid out of the plants. 

They wither and crumble and Cryhsalee spreads the liquid into the air. The droplets freeze over with a burst of Cryhsalee’s chi, then she slams her hands on the ground, sending a barrage of ice shards down on the redhead, breaking skin and earth on impact.

With no means to hide, the storm hits Ariasha full force and she throws herself onto the ground to save her face from cuts.

Cryhsalee dashes forward into the hail, aiming a kick at Ariasha’s side, but the girl hurls herself off the ground, jumping up, embracing her opponent.

They fall down together, landing on Cryhsalee’s back, and the pinch in her neck and her limbs going numb tell her it’s over.

Ariasha raises her head off Cryhsalee’s chest, dangling the pouch of senbon in front of her face. She nestles into Cryhsalee’s side, whispering into her ear with a softness that makes each hair on the sun-kissed skin rise.

“You’re amazing, please be my friend.”

“You are all awful parents”, Izaya bites out and gets into a fierce exchange of words with Mausami.

Cryhsalee is picked up by her father, whispering apologies, and watches Ariasha being carried away by her mother, their eyes locked the entire time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapters around 7k words long seem to be my thing.


End file.
